"True to life" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from the inside first. This variation goes to the extent of distinguishing influences of the soil as well as of social grade and temperament. His northerners speak and act otherwise than those of the south or west, and, in the main, are true to life, despite the author's ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... hear her voice and laugh. I know exactly how she behaved and what the old ladies and gentlemen said to her, how she dressed and how she did her hair; not because the author tells me just these things, but because her type is as true to life to-day as it was thirty years ago. As a contrast to her, a fine young lady from the city presently joins the household, and the aunt does not have to provide her with a tooth-brush. The new arrival wears blue satin slippers, drinks her chocolate in bed, and cannot dress ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... does not necessarily happen to another. There are men who, for love of a woman, would not take advantage of her insecurity. There are others who would. In my books I have made both classes do their will, and both are true to life. It does not matter what one book is or is not, but it does matter that an author writes his book with a sense of the fitting and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... is in modern fiction. In neither Dr. Sevier nor Bonaventure are there the buoyancy, vital interest, and unity of impression of The Grandissimes, which is one of the artistic products of American novelists. Cable may not have rendered the Creole character exactly true to life; but he has in a measure done for these high-spirited, emotional, brave people what Irving did for the Knickerbockers of New York and what Hawthorne did for ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... rupture—a rupture which is sometimes violent, sometimes gentle, but which is never altogether good-natured. Then also, as usual in such cases, each went a separate way—the eternal ending, which is always prosaic, because it is true to life. But the one thing that distinguishes Jean's liaison from the usual affair is the truly admirable character of ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... particular one. The bourgeois claps his hands exclaiming, "See it is unmistakably old Dobbin, the white spot on his fetlock is there and his tail ragged on the end; and the laborer, I know him at once. How true to life with side whiskers and that ugly cut across the forehead and his hat with the hole in it. The field too is all there, the stones, the weeds, the rows of stubble, nothing slighted. And the action of the light too, what a relief the figures possess, how like colored photographs they stand ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... quite sure that if I had not met you, I could have loved nobody as I love you. Yet it is very likely that I should have loved—sufficiently, as the way of the world goes. It is not a romantic confession, but it is true to life: I do so genuinely like most of my fellow-creatures, and am not happy except where shoulders rub socially:—that is to say, have not until now been happy, except dependently on the company and smiles of others. Now, Beloved, ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... all are virtuous persons in that story, even extraordinarily virtuous. But do you think them really true to life? Are there many like them? It is true that while reading, one accepts them because of the cleverness ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... a great air flight around the world, of adventures in Alaska, Siberia and elsewhere. A true to life picture of what may be accomplished in ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... no clue to the time when this was written. It is imperfect: the second verse is not complete in the copy. But is it not true to life so far as earthly hope is concerned? Of "the hope of the gospel" our songstress would ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... likely to offer pinchbeck wares to my public consciously. Schomberg is an old member of my company. A very subordinate personage in Lord Jim as far back as the year 1899, he became notably active in a certain short story of mine published in 1902. Here he appears in a still larger part, true to life (I hope), but also true to himself. Only, in this instance, his deeper passions come into play, and thus his grotesque psychology ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... to be remembered? Does it state its problem clearly, so that everyone can comprehend it, develop its angle absorbingly, and end, not merely stop, with complete satisfaction? Could one little scene be added, or even one little passage be left out, without marring the whole? Is it true to life—truer than life? If it is all ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... engravings Hogarth satirised the lives of all classes of the society of his day. When we look at them we live again in eighteenth-century London, and walk in streets known to fame though now destroyed, thronged with men and women, true to life. ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... is well in so serious a matter not to confuse things. This new religion may borrow from Christianity as it may borrow from Plato, or from Buddhism, or Confucianism, or even Islam. But it is not Christianity. Robert Elsmere may be true to life, as representing one of those tragedies which happen in critical moments of history. But a Christianity which tells us to think of Christ doing good, but to forget and put out of sight Christ risen from the dead, is not true to life. It is as delusive to the conscience ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... to this most unequal and imperfect book a certain crepuscular fascination of its own. Passages in it, certainly, are not undeserving that fine description of a style si tendre qu'il pousse le bonheur a pleurer. Emily's father, Mr. Hood, is an essentially pathetic figure, almost grotesquely true to life. 'I should like to see London before I die,' he says to his daughter. 'Somehow I have never managed to get so far.... There's one thing that I wish especially to see, and that is Holborn Viaduct. It must be a wonderful piece of engineering; I ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... young gardner finds his dreams projected into his farm. So ideals become realities, and thoughts become seeds that multiply. Mr. Calamity may shake his cane, but it will be behind a corner. Happy is he who makes facts of his thoughts that were true to life! ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... mounted true to life in form and expression may go far to beautify many dining rooms, dens, and hallways, enhancing the artistic tone of the rooms in which ...
— Taxidermy • Leon Luther Pray
... the French," Dan chimed in. "We have no literature at all now. Look at their work compared to ours, how short, crisp, and incisive it is! How true to life! A Frenchman will give you more real life in a hundred pages than our men do in all their ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... heroine. Consequently none of the author's women are as sharply defined as this weak, pleasure-loving French girl. The character drawing, though too much subordinated to the sensational elements in the story, is nevertheless distinct and true to life. ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... with their screams of joy. There may have been some truth in the assertion of his detractors that Hilary Vance's drawing was facile and too far on the side of mere prettiness; but no one in the world could deny that he made a splendid elephant: his trumpeting was especially true to life. ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... general, while describing the actions and setting down the words, I have left the reader to judge my people; for I think many writers must feel as I do, that, if characters are at all true to life, there is just as much uncertainty as to how far they are to blame in any course that they may have taken as there is in the case ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... figure among the crowd of abject ones, but the insignificant Jew became important when pointed out. If he had bowed, he would have been one more nobody, but his not bowing made him somebody who had to be crushed. The childish burst of passion is very characteristic, and not less true to life is the extension of the anger and thirst for vengeance to 'all the Jews that were throughout the whole kingdom of Ahasuerus.' They were 'the people of Mordecai,' and that was enough. 'He thought scorn to lay hands on Mordecai alone.' What a perverted notion of personal dignity ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... he is restricted to relating what has happened—that is, to fact; while the poet relates what should happen—what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. Instead of rehearsing facts, the dramatist or the epic poet creates truth. We expect him to be "true to life," and that is what is implied in Aristotle's "imitation of nature."[21] This truth to life controls, according to Aristotle, both the characterization and the action. In the ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... life embraced the first eighty years of the fifteenth century, offers in many important respects a contrast to his contemporaries Ghiberti and Donatello, and still more to their immediate followers. He made his art as true to life as it is possible to be, without the rugged realism of Donatello or the somewhat effeminate graces of Ghiberti. The charm of his work is never impaired by scientific mannerism—that stumbling-block to critics like De Stendhal in the art of Florence; nor does it suffer ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... reader's taste should be offended by finding the tragic and comic elements in too close proximity I trust that he will bear in remembrance that "such is life," and that the writer who would be true to life must follow, not ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne |
